Frankfurt anthology: Inger Christensen: "Sonnet XV"

Anyone who has heard the voice of the Danish poetess Inger Christensen will remember it forever: the melodic, gentle flow of her verses, as if he had been listening to the monotonously sloshing and ebbing waves.

An elegiac chant that develops an enticing effect, in which only the even elevations in the voice, which rises a little higher, express something like amazement at what is being said, as do the two intonations in “sommerfugle”, as the butterflies are called in Danish.

A wonder that perhaps comes before astonishment, the beginning of all knowledge - as poetry.

"The Butterfly Valley - a Requiem" is the name of the sonnet cycle, more precisely a "sonnet wreath" (corona di sonetti) with fourteen sonnets, which is followed by the sonnet presented here with the number XV as a "master sonnet".

It is made up of all fourteen opening and closing lines of the previous sonnets, which intertwine as if to form a “wreath” and, with their summary repetition in the last poem, condense into a kind of sound fabric of memory.

So for the third time they rise here, "the butterflies of the planet", just as all the following lines are identical repetitions of those earlier lines, only in a new relation and perspective.

If you look at the Danish original, you will see that the form follows the classical rule down to every line, every iambic accent, every final rhyme.

supreme poetic art,

Inger Christensen (1935 to 2009), who had previously also studied medicine, mathematics and chemistry, can be considered its master.

With her famous large poem "Alphabet", which is based on the Fibonacci series of numbers, she made her breakthrough in 1981 as one of the greatest poets of her time.

Ten years later, “Sommerfugledalen – Et requiem” was published in her country, like all her works, ingeniously translated into free rhythms by Hanns Großel.

Only man knows about death

Butterflies, the Danish summer birds - a requiem?

With the kaleidoscope of their colors, their "wing flickering" (Sonnet I), their lightness, their trickling from flower to flower, they are the epitome of cheerful poetry.

In mythology, however, they are also understood as the souls of the dead who, like them, have freed themselves from all earthly heaviness, from shell and chrysalis.

Metamorphosis: growth, decay and new growth are symbolically linked to their image, zoological imago.

All this is also contained in this wreath of sonnets, in which the metamorphosis, that forward movement, like the verse technique itself, takes place in a back as a memory.

And also in a down and up to that mountain valley near the Macedonian-Greek border, the Brajčino valley: the place

who, with the rise of the butterflies, brings the lyrical I the "summer visions of the dead who have disappeared" from grandmother and father (Sonnet XI).

Or in the middle of the cycle (Sonnet VII) the memory of a love union awakens in him, which resembles a communio with nature and its elements.

A mystical union – the barely visible quantum leap and the only break in rhyme that ensures progress in the constant change and cycle of nature, ensures that life “does not die like nothing”.

If you only want to grasp this sonnet approximately, you would have to unroll it with all its references to the previous sonnets, which in the image of the metamorphosis of the butterfly also reflect an image of the poetic, reminiscent ego, with all its “sweet lies”, all the mimicry , all that is light and heavy and dark to that which is exiled to the “bitter caverns beneath” as in Dante’s “Inferno”, with all the sadness and cheerful irony often evocatively evoked in all the names of the butterflies of Firebird, Black Apollo ( Mnemosyne) to Harlequin.

Everything that can only be perceived by the human eye, with his consciousness, when he wraps himself in camouflage in the imperial cloak (Sonett XIII) or his own death looks at him from the peacock's eye.

Only man knows about death.

This is it

If you have followed these lines, the soundtracks of this web of memory with its interweaving and reflection of times, spaces, rhythms and correspondences, if you have (back) followed this commemoration of the dead and of death, the last sonnet also arises like the butterfly at the end of its metamorphosis as a new imago: as transparent, clarified, light and yet mysterious as the wings of blues, admirals and mourning cloaks, in whose scales the light is refracted in many colors.

Full of sorrow and at the same time comfort, because there is also poetry in the alphabet of creation – and the poem that “the Great Fox can carry” in the last trio of XIV brings us this “master sonnet”.

Illustrations show him with flaming wings, black eyespots, and glowing blue facets at her hem.